psych

Psychodynamic and unconscious processes: Psychodynamic psychologists believed that personality and resulting behaviors are shaped by unconscious processes and interactions between the id (pleasure principle: it wants pleasure all the time!), ego (mediates between the superego and the id to act), and superego (similar to the conscience—knows the rules of society). 

Ego Defense Mechanisms: (six in chart, two below)!

The story of the examples: “Muffy, captain of the high school cheerleading squad, decides to leave her boyfriend of two years, Biff, the star football player, for Alvin, the star of the school’s chess team.”

• Reaction formation: “Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels. Example: Biff claims he loathes Muffy.”

• Rationalization: “Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence” OR coming up with reasoning that justifies undesirable behavior. Example: “Biff believes he will now find a better girlfriend. Muffy is not really all that pretty, smart, and fun to be with.” Example: a person who drinks excessively says that they are only drinking to be social; everyone else is drinking, too. 

Projective personality tests to probe the preconscious and the unconscious mind (you don’t need the names of specific projective tests, but here are some examples)

• PROJECTIVE PERSONALITY TESTS

  • The participant is given a vague or ambiguous stimulus and is asked to respond to it, often with a story

  • Attempts to measure the symbolic expression of conflicts and impulses and, therefore, is most closely associated with psychoanalytic and psychodynamic methods.

  • Unstructured with open-ended questions

  • Examples include Draw-a-Person, word-association tests, and sentence-completion tests.

  • Rorschach Inkblot Test

    • Participant is presented with a series of cards that have blots of ink on them; cards are presented one at a time in a specific order

    • Participant is asked to describe what he or she sees in as much time as they wish

      • Interpretation of the results is “supposed” to reveal how an individual solves problems, an individual’s intellectual level, and emotional stability

      • The test is currently of questionable diagnostic value

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

  • Developed by Henry Murray

  • A series of cards each with a different picture

  • Participant creates a story by providing a setting for the action in the picture, indicating what the future outcome will be, and identifying the emotions the characters are experiencing.

  • Frequently utilized to measure both achievement and affiliation motivations or as a starting point for conversations between clients and psychologists

The humanistic perspective of personality focuses on psychological growth, free will and personal awareness. It takes a more positive outlook on human nature and is centered on how each person can achieve their individual potential.

Self-actualization: reaching one’s full potential. Humanistic theorists believe all behavior is a result of the drive towards self-actualization. 

Self-transcendence: Setting aside your own needs for the greater good. The women who engaged in hunger strikes for suffrage and the union workers who put their lives on the line for safer working conditions are examples.

Unconditional positive regard: Some humanistic psychologists believe that in order to develop a healthy personality, children and adults need to be surrounded by others who offer unconditional positive regard and are accepting (supportive), genuine (honest), and empathetic (understanding and compassionate).

• Unwavering acceptance allows an individual to develop a sense of genuine goodness and reach his or her full potential.

• Used significantly in counseling and treatment methods.

Maslow’s hierarchy: the details of the hierarchy are not in the CED. It is included here to help you understand self-actualization and self-transcendence. 

•  Humanistic Psychology focused on the potential of the individual and his need for growth and self-actualization. It is based on the fundamental belief that people are innately good, and that deviating from this natural tendency results in social and psychological problems.

• Maslow's most well-known contribution to Humanistic Psychology is the Hierarchy of Needs.

  • According to Maslow, humans have certain needs that must be fulfilled for healthy living. These needs motivate us to act the way we do, and in particular, in ways that satisfy the needs that are not yet fulfilled. In addition, Maslow suggested that these needs are not all equally important but exist in a hierarchy (shaped like a pyramid), with the most important, basic needs at the bottom. For example, at the very bottom of the pyramid are things necessary for daily survival, like food and water. At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which is the most wonderful thing a person can achieve, but is not necessary to sustain daily life.

  • The hierarchy has been disproven, as we see many 

• Maslow's work was a turning point in psychology - before him, psychologists were preoccupied with mental illness and abnormality. In contrast, Maslow focused on mental health. His humanistic psychology gave rise to other types of therapy that were guided by the same belief in man's innate goodness and potential for growth.

The social cognitive perspective of personality emphasizes the importance of observational learning, self-efficacy, situational influences and cognitive processes.

• Reciprocal Determinism: how people think, how people behave, and what their environment is like all interact to influence the consistency of behavior.

• Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy is very influential (you need to know this!!!) Self-efficacy is the level of confidence an individual has regarding his or her ability to perform a particular task or skills. In other words, what does an individual believe he or she is capable of accomplishing? Individuals who have high self-efficacy for a particular task believe that success is possible and are more likely to continue to pursue goals when setbacks occur and to accomplish what they set out to do than those with low self-efficacy. 

• The ideal self-efficacy is slightly above a person's ability: high enough to be challenging while still being realistic.

• Do not get it confused with…

  • Self-esteem is the amount that one values oneself, for good or for bad.

  • Self-concept is the unique beliefs and personality characteristics an individual has about himself or herself.

  • Self-fulfilling prophecy refers to the expectations people have about themselves that lead them to alter their behavior, causing their expectations to come true.

  • Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute one’s success to dispositional factors and failures to situational factors.

The trait perspective of personality is centered on identifying, describing and measuring the specific traits that make up human personality. By understanding these traits, researchers believe they can better comprehend the differences between individuals.

Trait theories define personality as “a set of enduring characteristics that lead to typical responses to stimuli” (CED, 2024).

The Big Five Personality Traits

• Openness (inquiring, independent, curious)

• Conscientiousness (dependable, self-controlled)

• Extraversion (outgoing, social adaptive)

• Agreeableness (conforming, likable)

• Neuroticism (excitability, anxiousness)

• Measured using an objective personality test called the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R)

• Factor analysis: early psychologists listed hundreds of traits. Factor analysis was the process of grouping similar traits under larger headings to reduce the number of traits measured and discussed. 

OBJECTIVE PERSONALITY TESTS: Personality inventories

• Questionnaires that ask individuals to indicate if specific statements about behaviors, symptoms, emotions, or thoughts relate to them personally.

• Often true/false or multiple choice format

• Can be administered individually or large group

• Easy to score and can be given easily to large groups

• Most frequently used: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2)

  • Used to measure differences in personality and identify emotional and behavior problems.

  • Questions are divided into ten scales based on psychiatric categories, including measures for depression, schizophrenia, distrust (paranoia), anxiety, and others

  • 567 statements!! True, false, or cannot say in respect to their own behavior

  • Frequently used by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists to evaluate mental health

  • Also used in private and government settings for potential job applicants 

Motivation: the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. It is what causes you to act; involves the biological, emotional, social, and cognitive forces that activate behavior.

Drive: a psychological process that directs and maintains behavior towards a goal.

Theory of Motivation (Drive Reduction Theory)

• People are motivated by BIOLOGICAL needs, drives, responses, and goals

  • NEED - a necessity, especially physiological; a person has a need when he or she has an internal deficiency of some sort

  • DRIVE - an energized emotional state that pushes the person to do something; the need leads to the creation of a drive (primary vs. secondary is not in the current CED, but it is useful to know)

    • PRIMARY DRIVE - drives that are biologically connected to survival such as hunger, thirst, and sex

    • SECONDARY DRIVE - drives that are learned through conditioning and assist in attaining the goals of a primary drive; for example, people may be driven to earn money (secondary drive) to purchase food (primary drive)

  • HOMEOSTASIS - the body’s tendency to maintain an internal steady state of metabolism; to stay in balance

• Critics argue the drive reduction theory is too simple to explain all the varied behaviors of humans and animals

Self-determination theory: people are motivated by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. Incentive theory examines rewards as motivation. 

Incentives:  those stimuli in the environment, both positive or negative, that motivate our behavior. These things pull us to behave in certain ways (as opposed to drive which pushes us from within). 

• For example, if you are offered money to perform a certain behavior, the money is the incentive to perform that behavior.

Intrinsic Motivation: the act of doing something without any obvious external rewards. You do it because it's enjoyable and interesting, rather than because of an outside incentive or pressure to do it, such as a reward or deadline.

• If you are working at a job because you get a great feeling of personal satisfaction from it, and you are trying to perform the behavior for its own sake (not for money), then you are intrinsically motivated.

Extrinsic Motivation: reward-driven behavior; rewards or other incentives — like praise, fame, or money — are used as motivation for specific activities.

• Extrinsic motivation can also be to avoid punishment from others

• People who are extrinsically motivated tend to be less satisfied and become unhappy more easily (in general, not always)

• Overjustification Effect: a phenomenon in which being rewarded for doing something actually diminishes intrinsic motivation to perform that action

Sensation-seeking theory: humans are seeking an optimal level of arousal. The optimal level varies from person to person.  

Exerpt from PSY321 Course Text: Theories of Personality, by Michelle McGrath. 

According to Zuckerman (1979), “Sensation seeking is a trait defined by the need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences and the willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experience…The high-sensation seeker is sensitive to his or her internal sensations and chooses external stimuli that maximize them” (pg. 10).

All people seem to seek an optimal level of stimulation and/or arousal.  For some, that level of arousal is quite high, for others, it is rather low.  

Thrill and Adventure Seeking:  Many people enjoy engaging in risky sports and other potentially dangerous experiences that produce unique sensations related to speed or defying gravity, such as rock climbing, BASE jumping, or drag racing.  This factor is exemplified by the sports included in the X Games.

Experience Seeking:  This factor encompasses novel sensations and experiences, such as arousing music, art, and travel.  It also incorporates social nonconformity, particularly associated with belonging to groups on the fringes of conventional society.

Disinhibition:  This factor covers sensation seeking that focuses on social activities, such as parties, drinking, illegal drugs, and sex.

Boredom Susceptibility:  Individuals who score high on this factor cannot tolerate any kind of repetitive experience, including routine work and boring people.

Sensation seeking should not be confused with being reckless.  For example, individuals who are high sensation seekers are more likely to have varied sexual experiences, but they are not more likely to avoid using condoms.  They may be more inclined to drive fast, but they are not less likely to use their seatbelts. 

In this sociobiological sense, the high sensation seeker is a hunter and the low sensation seeker is a farmer.  Hunters are positively excited by change, danger, and the variety and unpredictability of the hunt. They need a strong capacity to focus attention on the prey while remaining alert to other factors like the direction of the wind and the movements of other hunters.  Farmers, in contrast, depend on stability of the environment (rainfall, sun, and other seasonal regularities of climate). Plants grow slowly and require patience and tedious kinds of labor to insure their survival. (pp. 384-385; Zuckerman, 1994)

Yerkes-Dodson Law: By Charlotte Nickerson on Simply Psychology

Relates to social facilitation as well, as it discusses the search for the optimal level of arousal.

“The Yerkes-Dodson law describes the empirical relationship between stress and performance.

In particular, it posits that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a certain point. This is also known as the inverted U model of arousal.

When stress gets too high, performance decreases. To add more nuance, the shape of the stress-performance curve varies based on the complexity and familiarity of the task.

Task performance is best when arousal levels are in the middle range, with difficult tasks best performed under lower levels of arousal and simple tasks best performed under higher levels of arousal.”

Instincts: A behavior that is genetically programmed into an entire species. Thus, the behavior is not the result of learning and can be seen across members of a species. 

• For example, there are specific nest building behaviors that are part of different species of birds. If you hatch one of these birds in captivity and raise it without any contact with any other members of its species, it will still do those species-specific nest building behaviors.

• Humans do not seem to demonstrate instinctual behaviors. 

Four Types of Motivational Conflict / Decision Making (Lewin’s Motivational Conflict Theory) 

According to the CED, you do need to know this one by name. 

Comparing Motivational Theories 

Hunger motivation is an interaction of physical and mental processes. 

External factors influence our consumption of food: the presence of food (larger serving sizes and stimulating variety make us eat more), the time of day, social gatherings around meals (we eat more with friends and less with cute dates or other people we feel nervous around) all influence what and how much we will eat. 

Satiety: the feeling of being full and not hungry that results in decreasing the likelihood that an individual will be motivated to eat. (Satiety = satisfied)

Glucose: the form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues.  When its level is low, we feel hunger.

Hormones: ghrelin and leptin are (regulated by the hypothalamus via the pituitary gland) and regulate feelings of hunger and satiety.

Ghrelin: My stomach is growlin’! Hormone secreted by an empty stomach to send “I’m hungry!” signals. 

Leptin: fat cells secrete this hormone; in response, the brain increases metabolism and decreases hunger. 

Set point: the point at which an individual’s “weight thermostat” is supposedly set.  When the body falls below this weight, an increase in hunger and a lowered metabolic rate may act to restore the lost weight. Research shows that it is possible to adjust this level with gradual, long-term changes to diet and activity levels. For that reason, some researchers believe this should be re-named “settling point.”

Basal metabolic rate: the body’s resting rate of energy expenditure. This rate can change depending upon the circumstances. For instance, people whose calorie intake is substantially reduced, such as participants in an experiment, began burning fewer calories, partly due to reduced activity, and partly due to a reduced basal metabolic rate. 

Emotion: a response of the whole organism, involving (1) physiological arousal, (2) expressive behaviors, and (3) conscious experience.

Facial feedback: the effect of facial expressions on experienced emotions, as when a facial expression of anger or happiness intensifies feelings of anger or happiness.

“The broaden-and-build theory of emotion proposes that positive emotional experiences tend to broaden awareness and encourage new actions and thoughts. Negative emotions tend to reduce awareness and narrow thinking and action” (CED, 2024). 24-25 AP Psychology: We will cover this in another unit. It will not be on our test for this unit. 

You need to understand and differentiate these theories of emotion, but you are not responsible for knowing the names. I am including them here for those who find them helpful. 

James-Lange theory: our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.

• One of James' most famous examples is that when we see a bear, we do not run because we are afraid. According to James, we see a bear and then we run, and that is why we are afraid. His explanation is that when exposed to a stimulus such as a bear, our nervous system reacts with an increased heart rate, a rush of adrenaline, or muscle tension, and our perception of those changes is what is referred to as emotion.

Cannon-Bard theory (Thalamic Theory): an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

Schachter-Singer theory (Schachter-Two Factor theory): to experience emotion one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

• This theory states that emotions are composed of two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. This pairing causes an individual's experience of emotion to stem from a mental awareness of the body's physical arousal. 

• So when seeing a poisonous snake, the Schachter-Singer model proposes that to have an emotion requires both physiological arousal (breathing fast, sinking stomach, sweaty palms) and a cognitive explanation for the arousal ("Yikes, that's a poisonous snake!"). During his career he also studied and published many papers about obesity, group dynamics, birth order, and smoking. As of 2002 Schachter was considered the seventh most cited 20th century psychologists.

The chart BELOW shows the three theories that you need to know (the first three on the chart), as well as two additional theories that may interest you.

Primary Emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, contempt, and surprise (universally recognized across cultures); some theorists also believe shame, shyness, and guilt should be in this category

The FIVE universal or primary emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness. Yes, the original Inside Out emotions. Research shows that these tend to cross cultures, though the results are mixed. 

Emotional Expression: crying, smiling, punching a wall, holding hands, punctuating texts with emoticons—all are expressions of emotion.

• Some emotional expressions develop early in life and may be universal (such as smiles), whereas others are specific to a particular culture, age group, or time period

• Emotional expression is so important to social interactions that infants become very distressed when their mother models a still face without any expression, and lack of emotions is often a sign of a psychological disorder.

• NVC (Nonverbal Communication): facial expressions, gestures, posture, distance, and nonlinguistic vocal characteristics that express emotional feelings

Research shows that emotions are not always expressed at the same times or in the same ways in every culture.

Elicitors: things that draw an emotional response. For instance, a bad smell elicits disgust. These can vary across cultures. 

Display rules: culturally accepted learned guidelines for when and how emotions can be expressed in particular social situations (i.e. public displays of affection). These vary across cultures and may vary across genders, ages, or socioeconomic classes within a culture.